Galerie Khoshbakht is thrilled to announce the opening of the exhibition Portrait II – presenting works by Beth Collar, Behrang Karimi, Mitchell Kehe, René Kemp, Yoora Park and Raha Raissnia.
“With this exhibition we are presenting our programme to New York City. Bringing together a group of artists undoubtably will put things into perspective. Lively conjugations, visual languages, memories, material histories; they fold into each other, dragging one another by the hand. The system will be put in place. However, living these ways of instituting, putting the distant thinking on the side and allowing our own lived experience to take centre, we slowly come to the realization that institutions and programs, no matter how they express themselves, are a beautiful thing; not because we must be critical of them but because we live in them.”
Opening: Friday, May 23, 6–8 pm May 24 – June 28, 2025
Drawing inspiration from Butoh, the artist’s show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, features collages of queer bodies
“We know we’re in a haunted house: Slug Sex (2025) – a video projection of two encircling slugs – is our first sight in ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’. Its cast light catches in the cobwebs of the gallery’s darker corners. The slug who deigns to top pushes out a goopy blue phallus that runs the length of its body, slugs being a hermaphroditic species. And this, being a Richard Hawkins joint.
Around the bend hang the 2012 ‘Ankoku’ collages, exhibited in that year’s Whitney Biennial. These compositions – hastily cut archival materials and notes taped intuitively beside printouts and calligraphy – mimic the notebooks of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the postwar Japanese dance form Butoh. Their posthumous publication disclosed how Hijikata approached choreography with a collage-like glom, pasting gestures torn from Western art history books alongside handwritten directives. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario write in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019), Butoh – which roughly translates to ‘waltz of darkness’ – is a loosening of signification that champions ‘arbitrary chains of movement [and] diseased or socially dispossessed peoples, or bodies in pain’.”
Born in New Zealand and now based in Los Angeles, the artist Emma McIntyre is no stranger to frequent travel. But the vibrant art scene of Hong Kong, the site of her second exhibition with David Zwirner, is a bit farther afield than even McIntyre ever imagined herself. Titled Among my swan, a name she’s borrowed from Mazzy Star, the show demonstrates the artist’s taste for chromatic abstractions that transcend the limits of language. “By introducing the swan motif,” McIntyre told Richard Hawkins last month, “I can connect to all the painted swans in art history.” She does so using oil paint alongside unconventional materials like oxidized iron, a gambit, Hawkins says, that suggests McIntyre’s granular attention to her artistic forbearers. “I think the difference is your investment in the history of painting,” he says, “but also how closely you look at other paintings.” Fresh off his own show at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, The Garden of Loved Ones, he and McIntyre got on a Zoom to discuss their shared obsessions: Baudelaire, art historian Michael Levey, and painting with your body, literally.
Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, bringing together key works from the past decade and centering on a new large-scale, site-specific commission of the same name.
Central to the exhibition is Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), a newly commissioned site-specific installation occupying the museum’s East Staircase. Originally built in 1933 for the Royal Asiatic Society, the building was repurposed in the 1970s to store confiscated books during the Cultural Revolution. Wu reanimates this forgotten history through arrangements of lanterns in book form, handcrafted from bamboo and conservation-grade paper traditionally used in rare book restoration. These sculptures line the staircase’s windows and interior, echoing the bundled books that once filled the space. The installation imagines a spectral return, volumes drifting back into the building as flickering presences, alive with the possibility of being read once more. At dusk, the lanterns begin to glow, casting inward and outward light, illuminating the museum’s East Staircase like a vertical scroll. Visible from Huqiu Road even after the museum’s operation hours, these fragile vessels hold space for the unspoken and the unreturned, allowing stories once silenced to shimmer faintly back into view.
The exhibition is organized by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Karen Wang, Assistant Curator and Researcher at Rockbund Art Museum.
On view through September 28, 2025 and a year-long, site-specific installation.
As part of Oslo Open ’25, Doris Guo and other artists will be opening their studios from April 26-27 this weekend.
As the roof caved in on the empire of the US dollar, a son of the diaspora returned to an art market buzzing despite censorship and mass exodus. Enter the Chinese century?
1.
Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, lives in an area of my mind with high green hills and banquet halls and concrete residential towers whose balconies jut like vertebrae along spines made of stone. Wild boar roam the hills in the dark. Political prisoners in the Stanley jail bake in humidity and sweat without any air-conditioning. Jet-lagged from New York, I was taking a nap one afternoon in our hotel on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island, and was dreaming that someone I loved was handing me a piece of paper. I began pulling at it with both hands – it was blank, no message – until I felt someone kissing my face.
Stephen Cheng on Ten Years of Empty Gallery, Jaime Chu, Spike Art Magazine
The founder of Hong Kong art’s black cube on sheltering artists from the system, programming as film-making, and the experimental drug called jet lag.
When I first moved back to Hong Kong as an adult in 2023, a new friend tried to recommend me cool things to do: “During a performance at the closing party for Vunkwan Tam’s show at Empty last year, [owner of noise label Mouhoi] Cedric Ng punched a sink until his hands bled.” They knew what to say, but they didn’t have to try so hard. In Hong Kong, historically an entrepot dominated by blue-chip galleries, unwieldy semi-private institutions, and a constellation of independent art spaces surviving precariously under colossal real estate conditions, Stephen Cheng’s Empty Gallery occupies an eclectic yet somehow exacting niche. It’s where minimalist experimental music, Japanese conceptual art and its heirs, and sculptural and filmic practices at the forefront of the Asian diaspora converge in a renovated industrial space notorious for its dark, cavernous interior. Friends who don’t otherwise care for contemporary art bring themselves to the hour-long queue for the gallery’s annual rave, and its artists have found genuine interlocutors within an industry that does not always afford them time.
Our current solo exhibition of Richard Hawkins, The Garden of Loved Ones, opened on March 23, 2025, and was written up in the following publications: The best shows to see in Hong Kong ahead of Art Basel, Payal Uttam, Art Basel Nine Solo Shows to See in Hong Kong, Spring 2025, Anna Dickie, Ocula 7 Shows to See During Hong Kong Art Week 2025, Claire Shiying Li, Frieze Headed to Art Basel Hong Kong? You Need to Make Time for the City’s 13 Can’t-Miss Exhibitions, Giuliana Brida and Katie Kern, Cultured Shows to See in Hong Kong, March 2025, ArtAsiaPacific
The exhibition, along with TRST03 Covey Gong, will be on view through May 24, 2025.
Ophela Lai, on the occasion of Empty Gallery’s 10th anniversary, interviewed Stephen Cheng, our gallery founder, in the Financial Times: “A pitch-black art gallery — now that’s a bright idea: Empty Gallery, a ‘black-cube’ arts space situated in a Hong Kong high-rise, has a reputation for immersive, experimental experiences:
Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery envelops you in darkness. The lift doors open and, for the few seconds before your eyes adjust, there is nothing but a void — no walls, no doors, no floor. Stephen Cheng opened the gallery in 2015 in an industrial high-rise block in Aberdeen harbour. It is a “black cube”: an inversion of the white-walled space that has been the default for showing art since the 20th century. Born in New York, Cheng — the grandson of Hong Kong shipping magnate Yue Kong-Pao — was educated at Eton, and later Harvard where he studied photography and film history (and took classes with Nan Goldin). Darkrooms and cinemas became his favourite haunts. It was in dark spaces where art entered his life “in an irrevocable way”.
March 7, 2025 – ongoing
Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, the Museum invites a deeper sense of community pride in the collection.
The exhibition includes Tishan Hsu’s phone-breath-bed 3, 2023, which the museum acquired in 2024 for their permanent collection.
Initiated in 1973 under the guidance of San José artists, SJMA’s collection has grown to reflect our international point of convergence, where dynamic cultural diversity and high-tech industries mix in California soil. SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process. Organized into thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the works of almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including Ruth Asawa, Martha Atienza, Shilpa Gupta, Yolanda López, and Elias Sime, among many others.
